This Norton Critical Edition includes five of Chekhov's major plays-- Ivanov , The Seagull , Uncle Vanya , Three Sisters , and The Cherry Orchard --and three early one-act farces that inform his later work--The Bear, The Wedding, and The Celebration. Laurence Senelick's masterful translations closely preserve Chekhov's singular style--his abundant jokes and literary allusions and his careful use of phrase repetition to bind the plays together. "Letters" is the largest collection of Chekhov's commentary on his plays ever to appear in an English-language edition. "Criticism" includes eleven essays by leading European and Russian Chekhov scholars, most appearing in English for the first time, including those by Boris Zingerman, Maria Deppermann, and Lev Shestor. This volume also provides discussion of Chekhov's plays by some of the twentieth century's great directors, including Konstantin Stanislavsky, Peter Brook, and Mark Rozovsky. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included. Anton Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860 in Taganrog, Russia. He graduated from the University of Moscow in 1884. Chekhov died of tuberculosis in Germany on July 14, 1904, shortly after his marriage to actress Olga Knipper, and was buried in Moscow. Laurence Senelick is the Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and author of more than a dozen books, including the award-winning The Chekhov Theatre and The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and the Theatre . He is director of his own translations of Gogol's The Inspector General (1998) and Euripides' The Bakkhai (2001).